Saturday was a club race we call "Short Six", a 5.7 mile course I've done a couple of times before. I was mostly familiar with the route, and anyway I'd just be following the people in front of me, so keeping on course shouldn't be a problem. (Queue ominous music...)

We start off, and soon a group of five guys forms ahead of me, and another group somewhere behind me. Nobody seems to want to run my pace, and I don't want to run theirs. I cruise along, pushing hard up a hill for about a mile, while the group ahead of me recedes further and further into the distance. After a while we turn onto some neighborhood streets with a lot of turns, and I'm only catching brief glimpses of the group ahead before they disappear around the next corner.

For a while, I'm running alone. Then it becomes a long while, then a very long while, and I'm starting to think this road doesn't look very familiar. But I'm having a good strong race, and I don't really want to stop, and I'm hoping maybe I'm just momentarily confused and this is still the right route. But finally common sense prevails, and I realize that I'm totally lost.

I tried to backtrack, but I couldn't even retrace my path in. After a couple of false starts, I finally stumbled back onto the beginning of the race route, and ran it in reverse. I arrived back at the start/finish line just as the last of the other runners were finishing. They were all cheering my on, and I had to admit that I'd gotten hopelessly lost.

At least I won the Pathfinder Award, and I think I covered about 6.5 miles at close to 10K pace, so I'll call it a good workout despite my bad sense of direction!